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CharterComm, thy services are no longer required
At my house we have Cable TV and Internet services through Charter Communications. In the last several weeks, Charter changed the behavior of their DNS to return a Charter-branded Yahoo! search page if the domain was invalid. This is bad because; one, it breaks the address bar search; two, I want Google; three, another example…
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Yet another way to break WEP Encryption
WEP has been broken for many years but there’s still some one that enjoys taking all the broken pieces and smashing them into even smaller pieces. The new attack requires the active injection of arp packets by the attacker. Which leaves the attacker open for discovery by an IDS installed on the victim network. The…
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Show some love to Sascha
Sascha Hlusiak took maintainership of the xf86-input-joystick driver. v1.1 had been unmaintained for a long time and didn’t work. When I saw the update come down the pipe I jumped on it. v1.2 works excellently, yay!
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Weird kernel config snafu
Recently configured a new 2.6.20 kernel and found that sound for Chromium B.S.U. no longer worked. The weird part was I couldn’t find any other applications that were affected. Chromium is the only game I have that uses OpenAL, so the kernel option I missed probably broke it. ebrake@laptop /boot $ diff -u ./config-2.6.20.3 ./config-2.6.20-gentoo-r4.old…
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Linux Kernel in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference
When Greg K-H announced his new book I was intrigued that he was distributing a downloadable copy for free. Even impressed that O’Reilly was allowing it to happen. The book offers benefits for both the “Kernel god” hacker and the greenest “What is a kernel?” newcomer. For the advanced user, parts two and three contain…
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menuconfig vs. gconfig
I don’t recommend using make gconfig to create a linux kernel config file. So far I have attempted to use the interface twice and both times I failed to enable some important options. This doesn’t happen when I configure using menuconfig. I think my eyes cross while using the GUI interface and I end up…
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kismet signal levels
Kernel 2.6.20 introduced a nice update for the ipw2200 driver. Previously the driver didn’t report power levels for wireless networks. This would show up when sniffing with Kismet, while viewing detailed info about a network. Using the signal levels it’s possible to home-in on the access point’s location. Sitting inside my house my connection with…
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documenting…
Documentation is often the most neglected part of a project because it’s easy to “just to do it” and jump to the next thing. It’ll come back to bite me though if I ever had to restore the laptop from scratch. So far I’ve got a seed started on describing the config of my laptop.…